This week, Grand Tamasha is launching a new four-part series on energy and climate issues in collaboration with CASI—the Center for the Advanced Study of India—at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the next several months, we will be putting a spotlight on some of the most pressing energy and climate issues facing India—from India’s green transition to the effect of climate on its coastlines, and India’s multilateral climate diplomacy. And we will be doing so by leveraging the expertise of many CASI experts and affiliates.

The first part of this new series looks at the connection between pollution and politics. Air pollution is often treated as an environmental or public health problem. But it is also a deeply political one—shaped by what voters demand, what politicians believe they will get credit for, which sources of pollution governments choose to target, and which institutions are capable of compelling action. 

To discuss why toxic air has proven so politically challenging in India—and what it might take to change that—Milan is joined on the show this week by Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar and Tariq Thachil.

Vaishnavi is an award-winning science and environment journalist based in Mumbai, and a former Visiting Fellow at CASI. She is a Contributing Correspondent for Science and an editorial consultant with The Times of India. She has previously worked as a staff editor at the Christian Science Monitor and editor of the magazine Time Out Mumbai.

Tariq is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2020-2025, he served as the Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI). Tariq has worked on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization and migration, but he is also developing a new research agenda on the political consequences of air pollution. 

The trio discuss why India and South Asia sit at the epicenter of the global air pollution crisis, why toxic air produces such little political pressure, and what politicians actually know about India’s dirty air. Plus, they discuss the role of civil society, the courts, and ordinary citizens in holding politicians accountable on climate issues.

Episode notes:

1.     Shikhar Singh and Tariq Thachil, “Why Is Air Pollution Not a Political Issue?  Evidence from India,” Working Paper, March 13, 2026.

2.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Climate Change is Stretching Mumbai to its Limits,” The Atlantic, February 7, 2022.

3.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Optics, Ambition, and a Genuine Transition: Reflections from the Inaugural Mumbai Climate Week,” CASI India in Transition, August 4, 2026.

4.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Mumbai's air quality: ‘Time to look at city’s airshed & not just localised pollution,’”Times of India, October 30, 2023.

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Milan Vaishnav Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. Today we're doing something that we've never done before. We are launching a new four-part series on energy and climate issues in collaboration with CASI, the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the next several months, Grand Tamasha will be putting a spotlight on some of the most pressing energy and carbon issues facing India, from India's green transition to the effect of climate on its coastlines and India's multilateral climate diplomacy. And we'll be doing so by leveraging the expertise of many CASI experts and affiliates. Today, our focus is on the connection between pollution and politics. Air pollution is often looked at as an environmental or public health issue, but it's also a deeply political one, shaped by what voters demand, what politicians believe they'll get credit for, which sources of pollution governments choose to target, and which institutions are capable of compelling action. To discuss why toxic air has proven so politically challenging in India and what it might take to change that, I'm joined on the show this week by two experts. Tariq Thachil is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2020 to 2025, he served as the director of CASI. He has worked on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization, migration, but he's also been developing a new research agenda on the political consequences of air pollution. Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar is an award-winning science and environment journalist based in Mumbai and a former visiting fellow at CASI. She's a contributing correspondent for science and an editorial consultant with the Times of India. She's previously worked as a staff editor at the Christian Science Monitor and editor of the magazine Time Out Mumbai. I'm excited to kick off this new CASI-Carnegie series with them. Tariq and Vaishnavi, thanks for joining us.

Tariq Thachil Thanks for having us, Milan.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Thanks for having me, happy to be here.

Milan Vaishnav So Vaishnavi, I want to start with you by just asking you to contextualize this issue of air pollution a bit. I think most of our listeners will be familiar with the litany of articles and social media posts that seem to come out every year pointing to the fact that South Asia sits at the epicenter of the global air pollution crisis. I wonder if we could maybe start there by just giving us a sense of the scale of the problem and why it seems that cities in India, and really across South Asia, have been so badly affected in particular.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you say South Asia because often the attention is on Delhi. And it is a South Asia problem. And one of the reasons it's a problem is that if you look at the Indo-Gangetic plane, which runs from Afghanistan, in the west to Nepal in the east, it is the most populated region in the world. And so, the economic activity is very high there. It's also geographically peculiar in the sense that the Himalayas are to the north and they kind of form a wall that blocks the pollution from dispersing. So that whole area is a bit like a plane and so that's where you see the most pollution and that's where you'll find every year there are these top 10 most polluted cities in the world, top 20 most polluted cities–and they're always dominated by cities, not just from India, but often from Pakistan and occasionally Bangladesh and Nepal too. It's just, they just sort of rotate, you know, through those cities. And, you know, it's been a problem for a while and it's just been growing and growing with activity and with, I would say, the challenges that are faced by the municipal, state and national governments to contain that pollution, both locally and across boundaries. And you're right, every year it pops into the news when it's pollution season, which is winter, because that's the time that the meteorological conditions are especially good for keeping the pollution trapped on the ground level. And then everyone forgets about it until the next year comes around. In fact, this year, I think for one of the first times we're seeing the Delhi government just announced a series of measures just a few days ago to ban construction for six weeks in December and January. And I think we're seen for the first time some effort to preempt crises.

Milan Vaishnav So, Tariq, I want to pick up where Vaishnavi left off, which is this connection between the kind of toxic air and politics. You know, your work on this subject starts with a pretty interesting kind of political puzzle, which is, you know, if you step back, air pollution's pretty visible, right? You can see it, you can smell it, it affects your body, it affects people directly, personally. The health consequences can be very severe, particularly during certain times of the year and as they accumulate over time. Yet all of this has seemed at least historically to generate remarkably little political pressure. And I'm wondering if you could just kind of give us a sense of, you know, as political scientists, how does one think about the kind of universe of explanations that might account for this real failure of democratic accountability?

Tariq Thachil Yeah, thank you, Milan. And before I kind of answer your question, let me just say a congratulations on crossing 300 episodes of Grand Tamasha. It's a real achievement, and many of us have learned from the conversations you've created on this platform. And I think you say on the show, it's a labor of love. So, thanks to you and your terrific team for that.

Milan Vaishnav Thank you.

Tariq Thachil In terms of your question, you know, my thoughts on this topic, you know, we are not, me and my co-authors Shikhar Singh at Duke and Shahana Sheik at Yale, you know, are not pollution policy experts. There are many people like that who know a lot more about the kind of technicalities of pollution than we do. Fantastic journalists like Vaishnavi, who have covered the issue for much longer. But where we've come into it is exactly what you said as political scientists, I Thank you. A kind of professional lens, but on a personal level, all three of us are from broadly the Delhi NCR region. And as you know, air pollution is the topic of drawing room conversations and even complaints for several months each year, as Vaishnavi also alluded to, especially among relatively wealthy Delhiites, many of the wealthiest residents of the city now even routinely flee the capital during the heavy winter months. But of course, the vast majority of Delhi residents and residents of the Indo-Gangetic Plain that Vaishnavi referenced can't afford to simply exit the place they live. And so, they're faced with living with air pollution that has, as you said, visible adverse and immediate impacts. And so, what can citizens do? Well, historically in India, one thing they can do is pressure their governments to act on this problem. And what was interesting to us is that, there's not a lot of public opinion data on this question, but- When we looked at kind of voter surveys conducted by Lok Niti at CSDS, both for the nation and for Delhi specifically, from a period from about 2013 to 2020, we basically found that when voters were asked, you know, what were the important election issues to them, less than 1% mentioned pollution in any of those samples, both the Delhi sample and the national sample. So very few. But in most of those cases, it was something like 0.1% who said this was an important issue to them. We also looked at newspaper data on public protests. So, we looked at about nine million news articles across English and Hindi language newspapers from 2012 to 2023 and basically looked for reports for any protest linked to air pollution and basically found none, other than a couple in November of 2019 and December of 2020. In each instance, gatherings of a few hundred people in Delhi. There was another protest like that fairly recently, but in all of these cases, it was not a sustained mobilization. Because a few hundred people, some of the news reports actually had organizers complaining that there wasn't a lot of support. And after a couple of days, the protest petered out. And so that I just want to set the backdrop for your readers that, you know, this is a context in India where we know that there are both, you know, voters are not shy about making demands on their governments and also people protest routinely for a range of issues, including historically environmental issues, you know, and so the question is, why is air pollution not meriting that kind of pushback? And the fact was we just didn't really see any dedicated study of public opinion on this issue. So, we tried to take a first step by doing a study of about 3,000 residents, a representative sample of Delhi residents to begin with in Delhi. Of course, the problem is much beyond Delhi to get to the bottom of this. And I'll talk a little bit more about what we find in the conversation. But essentially, the kind of classes of explanations we were looking at as, you know, are people just not aware of this problem or sufficiently aware of problem. Do they somewhere prioritize development over environment? Do they kind of see a trade-off between trying to fight pollution and economic growth? Do they lack clarity over whom to even hold responsible? Not just, you know, should we hold the government responsible, but which level of government, as Vaishnavi mentioned, it's, you know, national government, state government, municipal governments. And, you know, are they kind of fragmented in what kinds of mitigation policies that they want to support. So, everybody wants to do something about it, but different types of residents in Delhi, wealthy versus not, support different kinds of actions. So, these are some of the classes of explanations that we decided to try and examine in the study.

Milan Vaishnav So I want to follow up with you in a second about what you actually found in the survey. Before I do that, Vaishnavi, let me just turn to you because one of the interesting things, if you kind of look at the history of Mumbai, is that, you know, air pollution isn't a new problem. I mean, we often talk about it as a kind of current contemporary issue, but, you know, there's a lineage, there is a history here. And in some of your work, you've talked about how, you know, the city fought major pollution battles in the 70s, 80s, again, at the turn of the century, and, you know, in many cases actually can point to signs of progress. So, I guess one of the questions to ask is, you know, why does the problem keep coming back? What did those earlier episodes fix, and what issues did they leave kind of unresolved and still on the table?

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Yeah, yes, it's a good question. And in the past, as with any city, if you look back, initially there's industries. I mean, when the city was industrial, in the 20th century or late 19th century, the pollution comes from industries. And then there's a battle against that pollution and that gets fixed. That happened in Bombay in the 60s and 70s with the refineries and big industries. And then in the 90s, just as in Delhi, there was a whole pollution battle waged against vehicular pollution. And these were very polluting diesel vehicles, especially sort of rundown public transport buses, taxis, autos, but also, you know, regular vehicles. And there were NGOs that got together, went to court and got a series of autos laws passed that changed, in both cases, changed the technologies used by the industries. And that was critical. I think now what's happened is that new sources have come up of pollution, and the scale of pollution has increased. So, industries were fixed, and then vehicles were fixed to some extent. And now, for example, in Mumbai, we've had since COVID, since the lockdown sort of opened, we've a huge surge in construction. You know, at one time, I think there were like 11,000 open construction sites in the city. So, we have this huge surge of construction and construction dust. But we still have a refinery on the outskirts. So, the sources have changed. And so each time there's a new source, I think, you know someone comes up and tries to tackle that with specific laws and things like that. I would say that in India, sources are generally more heterogeneous. I think in Europe, there's industries, there are vehicles and things like that, but in India, you also have open garbage burning. You also have wood and dung, stuff, smoke. So there's a great heterogeneity of sources. And lastly, I'll say, I think there's an element of scale now. There's just so much. Well, one of the scientists that I interviewed on this a few months ago about why Mumbai because Mumbai forms an interesting counterpoint to Delhi because geography favors Mumbai. The sea breeze comes in and sweeps away all the smoke. And so it's been lucky. But as one scientist told me, the airship, the capacity of the air ship to absorb and sweep it away has been exceeded. So, there is an element of scale, I think, to this that requires a different governance mechanism, a different kind of framework to address it.

Milan Vaishnav So, Tariq, I want to just come back here and bring the voter, the individual back in, right? You had walked us through some of the classes of explanations that political scientists have used to try to explain this disconnect between a visible air pollution crisis on the one hand and the lack of, you know, country or effort by the government to do something about it. When you carried out your survey of these 3,000 ordinary residents of Delhi, which explanation is actually borne out by the facts?

Tariq Thachil Yeah, and I think, you know, it's important to note that we looked at some of these kind of classes of explanations, but a lot of our survey was also motivated by talking to a lot of people in Delhi, both kind of policy experts, technical experts who've been studying air pollution for many years, and just ordinary residents to try and ask them, you know, why do you think this has not emerged as a political issue? And one that both sets of people kind of highlighted was this idea that maybe people, despite the fact that, you know, there's all this news coverage, etc. People are still not fully aware or at least don't rate it as concerning as certain other issues such as things like trash collection or sewage disposal or building of roads and the kind of bread and butter issues that often animate Indian politics. We did not find that to be the case. We found that air pollution rated just as seriously as those very salient issues and more importantly I think that that importance was there, that kind of high level of concern and awareness about air pollution was true across the class spectrum. So, the other thing we've heard is that maybe poorer residents are less aware this is really a kind of an elite issue. We found that for citizens across the spectrum of affluence, people are both very rate pollution as a very significant issue, equivalent to things like trash collection and sewage disposal that have been kind of salient, but also they recognize that it creates issues even for their personal health. Over three quarters of respondents said it creates difficulty in breathing during winter months. The second thing we did not find is that people just privilege growth or development over the environment. This was interesting to us because a majority of citizens do perceive a trade-off. They actually do think that fighting pollution will come at the expense of economic growth. But despite this trade-off, a majority actually did not favor just prioritizing development over the environment and we asked this question in many different ways that I'm happy to get into. But we did not find strong evidence for that either. And finally, the final thing that we didn't find evidence for was that there was confusion over whether this is even something the government should and can act on and which tier of government. So in particular, we thought that, you know, there's a given the nature of pollution and the fact that sources of pollution in a place like Delhi do come from both local and extra local sources. There might be some voters who think the central government is responsible, some who think, the state, some who thinks, you know, the, the local Delhi government, the local municipal government. And so if there's a lot of fracturing of public opinion on that, you know, you can't really coalesce to hold one arm of government responsible. Somewhat surprisingly to us, we found considerable consensus. Over 80% of respondents basically think the state government is responsible for pollution. We tried to ask this in a number of different ways to kind of account for different party types in control of the government. And basically, no matter how we asked it, the state government, at least Delhi residents think the state government is the arm that they want to hold responsible. And whether or not that's right or wrong, I think all levels of government can play a role here. There is, you know, from a kind of just bringing political forces together, it seems like people are aware, they prioritize this issue, and they know which tier of government they want world responsible. So then what is impeding politicization? The two things that we found, the first was that we found that this kind of partisan logic to how this issue is getting politicized in India. So citizens appear unwilling to blame their own party for failures on pollution. So without going into too many details, we adapted a common technique used in the study of partisan politics in the US for detecting whether respondents view government performance on air pollution through kind of partisan tinted glasses. Essentially, when we show, for example, ARP voters, when we can discuss this issue with them, they are much more willing to blame the BJP and much less willing to blame ARP when shown news reports of an identical government failure on this issue. By contrast, it's exactly reversed for BJP supporters when shown news reports of the exact same failure. In other words, when voters are told about the same policy failure, they are much more willing to blame a rival party and much less willing to blame their own. And political scientists think that, you know, such selective blame can dampen accountability pressures because it basically means politicians have weak incentives to act on this issue because they are unlikely to be rewarded by new supporters for good performance or blamed by their existing supporters for poor performance. And I think it bears mentioning this, this finding, because the effects we uncovered were large, roughly three times the difference. Found in similar studies of the US, which is striking to us because partisanship in the US is a big issue. It seemed to kind of animate a lot of political behavior. And by contrast, air pollution in India is not one that we typically thought of as there being, you know, very big partisan disagreements on. It's not like the parties are very different in their kind of view about climate change, environmental issues, et cetera. It has not been so embedded. One thing that we've been trying to think about is that kind of partisan blame game. The politics is lending itself to a partisan blame game being the way in which this issue gets politicized. We can come back to that as, you know, kind of how this issue might get politicized going forward. But the second thing that we thought that we found that impeded accountability was that basically voters, while they in theory support taking action to mitigate air pollution, the moment any of those policies hit them personally, in terms of any cost, that support evaporates. For example, we found [that] 83 percent of respondents supported a one-car limit on households. But the vast majority of respondents in Delhi don't own a car, so they wouldn't be affected by this. By contrast, the vast-majority opposed stricter pollution policies on bikes. Nearly two-thirds of our sample were in households that own a bike. Similarly, nine in 10 citizens said, yes, we want greater government spending on air pollution reduction, which sounds great, but that drops by more than half if they're told the cost of such spending would require increases in taxes or fees on voters like them. So, in other words, this is kind of very shallow base of support. If a politician is thinking of politicizing this issue and taking action, they're facing an electorate who is, you know, the prospects of backlash if any kind of costs fall on them are quite extreme. So I think these are the two areas, the kind of partisan selective blame and this very shallow support for mitigation that might be impeding accountability pressures.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, one of the things that I found very interesting is that, you know, clearly we have a situation where voters are partisan, they are very sensitive to personal costs, they don't necessarily naturally or innately treat pollution as an electoral issue, there are lots of other issues that they're facing in their lives. And so, I think one of questions that you and your co-authors raise is, okay, what then can actually break this equilibrium, and I know that you've experimented with trying to make pollution more personal, which is, you know, kind of showing people the air quality of their breathing and trying to connect it directly to the health consequences they or their families might be suffering. To what extent does that move the needle and increase the political salience of the issue.

Tariq Thachil Yeah, this was a preliminary finding, but that may be one that offers a bit of a silver lining, which is that while our interviews and surveys show Delhi residents are very aware about the general issue of pollution, our interviews also reveal that awareness about specific features of air pollution may not be as broadly known. People know it's a big problem in general, but we thought that one area that providing information that maybe every voter doesn't have ready access to is about the degree to which pollution also is a problem inside their homes. We often talk about the dampening effect of the costs of mitigation. So if you take an action on mitigation, that may cost the voter something and that creates a dampening effect. I just talked about that. But we thought there are also costs of pollution itself, and often those are under-discussed. That pollution itself has very deep personal costs, and some of those costs may be outside of the grasp of voters. So here, we were motivated by the fact that we often heard residents saying air pollution was an outdoor problem, not as much of an issue inside the house. And in Delhi, at least, this perception appeared heightened by certain kinds of reactive policies. So, for example, school closures on high pollution days, which voters then interpreted as evidence that staying home was somehow protective. Now, this is patently not the case. Even during the survey, we actually had enumerators measure AQI inside and outside the homes of respondents and found a minimal difference. So ,on a day where it was like 215 AQIs outside, it was 212 AQIs inside. And a lot of people, anecdotally in Delhi, say, oh, but people now run air purifiers inside the home. That's a very small slice of respondents. Only 6.5% of respondents in our sample owned an air purifier, and most said they only ran them for a few hours a day. So, what we did was, we conducted an experiment in which enumerators actually told respondents what their indoor AQI was for some respondents at the start of the survey and others only told at the very end after all the questions were asked. And basically, what we found is with the voters who we told at the beginning, what their Indoor AQI was, that actually raised their political prioritization of air pollution quite significantly. Now, again, I don't want to make too much of, you know, just one finding, but it does suggest that more than just general public awareness and innumerable news reports of how bad Delhi air is, which we're about to enter that season again, actually specific awareness around specific dimensions of air pollution that's more tailored and personalizes pollution's may help stimulate the prioritization of this issue.

[…]

Milan Vaishnav It's useful to talk about voters, but sometimes we look at voters at the expense of thinking about other kinds of organizations or institutions that can put pressure on government to change tack. And in the earlier Mumbai battles that you document, one of the set of actors or collective collection of actors that that stepped up are kind of these very civic environmental groups, right? And they seem to have been unusually consequential in the sense that they could go out, they could mobilize expertise, they could to court and file lawsuits, they sometimes had personal or professional access to very senior policymakers. And one of the reflections I found that was quite telling is that over time, many of those organizations seem to have either disappeared or become much weaker, more fragmented. How important do you think the transformation of civil society is to understanding why the politics of pollution look very different today than they did maybe in the 70s or 80s?

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Yeah, totally, I would say these NGOs, the Smoke Affected Residents Forum was one of them, the Bombay Environment Action Group was another of them. Very powerful NGO of the second half of the 20th century. These were the ones that went to court and got a series of orders on pollution. And on a variety of environmental issues, actually, up to the early 2000s, I would say. And they had a disproportionate, I don't know if disproportionate is the right word, they had significant influence on policy through the courts, and sometimes through representation in government, especially, you know, I think in the earlier years where frankly a lot of bureaucrats knew the people who were running these NGOs as well, and so there was a kind of social connect as well. But those big historical NGOs have declined and a couple of them have vanished. They were very significant for several decades and in the early 2000s, they sort of slowly eroded away, and a few have risen in their place but they're not as big, they're not as well funded. And there's a lot more of these small, fragmented groups that they coordinate over social media or WhatsApp. And I mean, it's not, you know, it's good, you know, they have their own strategies, but it's not as, it doesn't seem as effective as the big NGOs were in say the 80s or 90s, and they got these big orders from the courts. I would say, though, that I feel like, to be honest, with this new youth movement, I'm curious to see how that influences the Cockroach Janata Party. Which is, you know, tomorrow holding a huge rally near my house, actually. I'm curious to see what the sudden upsurge of activism in this youth, whether it leads to new formations in terms of civic and environmental groups. But certainly, I would say those highly well-funded, highly well researched, with top lawyers on their rolls, that era does seem to have receded. And that's part of the reason, I think, that you don't see these significant victories, at least in Bombay anymore. I'd also say the 2000s were also when a lot of other movements receded, the trade union movements, the labor movements. In the early 2000s, when those pollution measures were being sort of ordered from the high court, the taximen and the buses have to change their fuel, they have to change their technology. There were massive strikes. By transporters, led by fairly veteran leaders, those don't exist anymore. So those broad-based social movements in the last century have sort of vanished, and it's not clear exactly what's taking its place. There still seems to be a ferment and flux going on. I just wanted to make a sort of point to Tariq's point about indoor air pollution. I should say that two years ago, we got an indoor air quality monitor in my house, and I had the shock of my life, you know, to see how high the pollution was. And I hadn't realized how bad it was. And then I sort of, even though I covered this issue, and I see the data, somehow I was like, oh, I'm breathing this at home and that's why I'm falling sick. And that was a sort of real light bulb moment for me, despite all my theoretical knowledge about the issue. Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to say, yeah.

Milan Vaishnav Yeah, I mean, I didn't know, I think it really speaks to what Tariq and his experiment is pointing to, right? Which is that once you internalize or are made aware of how this affects you even within the four walls of your own home, it changes your mindset. You know, there's something else that's running through this conversation and some of your work, Vaishnavi, that I wanted to pick up on is this question of visibility. Right? And I think you might have said this early on, which is governments tend to crack down on things people can see. So, if you can see like a dusty construction site, that's a target. If you can see old vehicles on the road, that is a target, but they crack down these things even when there are less visible sources that may account for a larger, more dangerous share of pollution. And so, I guess I'm wondering how you think about this. I mean, do the kind politics of visibility systematically distort? Air pollution policy and then what does that mean in terms of who ends up bearing the costs?

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Yeah. Yeah, this is a question I think about all the time. And it's also a question in the science of pollution. Because what is visible in terms of pollutants is large particles, and that's not necessarily the most dangerous pollution. Actually, the smaller invisible particles can be more dangerous to you. So even in the signs of pollution, the question of visibility arises. In terms of the sources of pollution and who gets sort of targeted. Yeah, I mean, in the recent pollution campaign that we've seen in Mumbai over the last like year or so, two, two sources have been targeted. One is construction sites. And one is bakeries, of all things. And the bakery's target always I found funny, because if you look at the breakup, it's like 3% of pollution contributed by bakeries. And there's some 18 to 20 bakeries in the old city. And yes, they're very old, but how much pollution are they really giving? But they're easy to target. They were easy to target in the court and to say, bring the bakeries association here to the court. And you must change all your wood ovens and your coal ovens that you've been baking bread in for 100 years, to electric. And then the construction sites, yes, I mean, they are a big source. I think they're like 14 to 16% of pollution, they're enormous. They're across the city. And so, if you live near a construction site, it is a huge problem. But that's also a doable source, you know, you can see it. And you can call the real estate developers and say you must put monitors up, you must do this, you most do that. And by contrast, vehicles, you know, private vehicles, there are now, you know, maybe 10 years ago, there were 2 million, now there are 5 million in Bombay. And it's not as if even though they follow these pollution standards, you know, the euro standards, it's not they don't pollute, they do pollute. You just can't see it anymore. They're not the sputtering diesel vehicles of old, you know, it is less visible. But when you have 5 million of them, they're definitely polluting a lot. They're contributing some 15%, I think, in Mumbai. And I'm just talking about Mumbai City. But nobody really wants to go after them. Nobody wants to go after the car owner, the aspirational commuter class, you know, bikes in Delhi, but here, you're car owners. And, you know, people have fortified cars in each home, many homes. And I think the court did raise it last year, the court did ask the government, why can't you limit the number of cars? And the government said, we can't do that. You know, so yes, who gets whose pollution gets controlled, I think is a very political question, and an economic question as well.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, I want to flip the lens a little bit and talk about the politicians because Tariq, I know that this is kind of a source of new work where you are turning the lens and instead of looking at the voter or looking at a politician. And I wonder if you could just preview for us a little bit some of the findings from a survey that you've done of state-level politicians in this Indo-Gangetic plane that we've been talking about to try and kind of understand the reasons for inaction. But before we kind of dig into what you found, just tell us a little bit about what the survey entails and how you went about doing it. I mean, I think interviewing politicians at scale is no easy task for anyone who's ever tried to take this on.

Tariq Thachil Yeah, absolutely, and I think it dovetails nicely with what Vaishnavi was talking about, because I think, it's absolutely important to look at the supply side of this as well, in terms of what is our political system even incentivized to act on? And I think her point about visibility, the kind of visible pollution, not always being from a public health perspective, the most dangerous one, does create a kind of tension between political incentives and health efficacy. But basically, I think our motivation is very similar among citizens, which is, given that we're not seeing a lot of bottom-up mobilization on this issue, another avenue for change is from leaders themselves. But we have very little data on how elected officials in India actually think about this issue. You know, how informed are they? What are their preferences on how this issue should be tackled? And so, we basically tried to do a face-to-face survey of state-level legislators. So, these are MLAs and runners-ups in the MLA elections in UP, in Uttar Pradesh. Which is the obviously most popular state within this Indo-Gangetic plain. And we were able to survey about 570 of about 860 odd respondents, pretty evenly split across parties. And to our knowledge, this is one of the most systematic efforts to survey Indian senior political leaders at this scale. And our hope was it would shed some light on how they think about this critical issue. And, you know, engaging with them in face-to-face conversation would give us some sense of how they're thinking about this.

Milan Vaishnav I want to just kind of highlight some of the results that I found very striking, which is I think that kind of really relates to the kind of information gaps, right, which is half of politicians you surveyed knew what AQI was. I think fewer than four in ten could tell you when AQIs becomes a problem, when it becomes harmful. Only I think around 15% knew what PM2.5 was. And so, you have these information gaps. At the same time, politicians largely, and maybe correctly, don't think voters care very much about this or prioritize it. So, I wonder, as you step back as a researcher, what does all of this kind of tell you about the supply side of the accountability problem?

Tariq Thachil Yeah, I mean, first, exactly what you said correctly, that we found actually relative to, given these are senior political figures, actually kind of low levels of basic awareness. I mean relatively speaking, we would have expected kind of senior politicians, maybe more than half. It was actually a little bit less than the percentage of Delhi citizens who knew about AQI. And so, I think that kind of low basic awareness that you alluded to, but also sometimes holding views that may dampen their perception of the scale of the crisis. So, for example, and this is a propo, actually, one of the first things Vaishnavi said, 40% of respondents disagreed that air pollution is a big problem in rural areas. In other words, a majority think of it as an urban problem. And this is pretty galling, given that it's a big issue specifically across rural and urban Uttar Pradesh, the state in which the study was taking place. And also, a sizable majority think Indians have greater quote unquote, natural immunity to air pollution than foreigners. And they're not alone in this, you know, we took this from conversations that we'd heard and popular perceptions that do filter through in northern India. So I think that's the second problem, not just low awareness, but some perceptions that make this problem kind of minimize the severity of the problem. And then third, which is, I think, actually accurate, they kind of confirm that basically voters in their constituency almost never come to them to make demands on this problem. So we add all of that up, low awareness, some inaccurate beliefs, and a lack of bottom-up demands. Basically, it's a picture of pretty weak incentives for politicians to act on this issue, right? So we have a lack-of-voter mobilization and then politicians of their own holding beliefs that don't necessarily incentivize them to act. So a lot of what the rest of our study was trying to look at is how do we take political incentives kind of seriously and what might actually shape kind of action on this issue that seems kind of politically more incentive compatible for politicians. And again, we can talk about that. But I think given these low levels of awareness and the lack of bottom-up mobilization, we do have to kind of think about what makes action and effective action politically palatable. And that's kind of the next step of what we're trying to look at.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, could you just kind of maybe sketch that out a little bit for us, which is, you know, what are the kinds of things, you know, given this kind of suboptimal equilibrium we seem to be trapped in, that might incentivize or compel politicians to take action on this suite of pollution related issues a bit more seriously?

Tariq Thachil Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, once again, when we were having these conversations with pollution experts, you know, organizational work, you know, kind of civil society people and even, you know, voters, a lot of what we heard, I mean, there is no lack of technical knowledge on this subject in India. You know, we have a lot of excellent, you know, scientific and technical research. We understand source attribution to a reasonable extent of where pollution comes from. We have a menu of potential policy solutions. This is not a novel problem in that sense. So what, where our conversations often stopped was with experts saying, you know, there's a lack of political will, but there was a kind of black boxing of that, which as political scientists, we said, well, then that's where the action is, you now, and rather than think of political incentives as some kind of dirty problem to be danced around, let's think about how to increase that, like why should politicians not follow political incentives? I mean, in some ways that is their job. So I think one thing that we thought about is how do you design and frame technically effective policies? In ways that make them appealing to politicians. So, for example, making clear how implementation for a policy would allow a politician to claim credit for taking action. I mean, Vaishnavi was alluding to this with this kind of issue of bakeries, right? But a favorite example that was given to us by experts was smog towers, which are kind of divided as ineffective and yet often seen as kind of popular with politicians because they're kind of easy to claim credits for. You know, they are visible. It's not just the pollution being visible, but the solution being visible. And something that you can kind of say this is something that I can put my name on that I have done. And this is an important- What is a smog tower? A smog tower is, I mean, I can let Vaishnavi explain, but essentially it's a, it's, think of it as like a giant air filter for the location of where the tower is. And one of the reasons it's derided is it's, you know, maybe slightly effective at the location of the small tower, but it's not something that can kind of solve this problem at scale. But smog towers are things that, you know even politicians in our interviews often said, you know, that would be something that you know they would be interested in and you know there's something they can put their name on. It's something that's highly visible, you know, and again rather than roll our eyes at it, I kind of feel like yeah i mean it makes sense. If I’m a politician who is trying to get my name out there, then that makes sense is something that i would want to do and air pollution this is a tricky thing for air pollution because air pollution in any one area comes from many sources both local and non-local So it's not straightforward to measure policy success, let alone attribute any portion of it to an individual politician, compared to say paving a road or cleaning a drain or providing a water tanker. So I think in that vein, what one of the things we kind of found in our survey was that when we presented politicians with different policy options, their preferences were often shaped by what they saw as politically attractive or at least not prone to backlash. For example, when they were given those options, they were pretty open to going with green ideas. For example they significantly preferred providing subsidies for e-rickshaws to an equivalent rupee subsidy for purchasing motorcycles, both of which might be distributively popular with voters, but one is more environmentally friendly. Again, I don't want to make too much of this, but a lot of what we're thinking about is we know what are technically effective policies. But if a lot of them are punitive or prone to backlash against car owners, fines, et cetera, how do we shape them and frame them and present them to politicians in ways that allow them to think about how they might claim credit for it, how it might mitigate any backlash? And I think the discussion has been much less developed on that front than on the technical side of what would make a good policy.

Milan Vaishnav So, you know, we've talked about a lot of different actors that have a role to play, you know civil society, kind of the individual voter politicians, we haven't explicitly talked about the courts yet. And I know if you look at Bombay's history, they did play a large role. I mean, there was litigation that happened in the late 1990s. There was a renewed intervention by the Bombay High Court, I believe, after the crisis of 22-23. And so I guess I'm wondering, you know, to what extent, from your experience in the city, have courts been a sort of effective substitute for political pressure, or are there real ways in which kind of this kind of court-driven, you know judiciary-driven environmentalism, you know runs up against very kind of important limits?

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Yeah. I mean, I think that the heyday of environmental activism by the courts was perhaps in the 90s and not just in Bombay, I would say in Delhi and the Supreme Court as well. In Bombay for sure, there were court orders on noise pollution in the 90s, there was court orders in heritage, there are court orders and hills, there was court order on a bunch of environmental issues that were really important, including air pollution up to the early 2000s. And even at that time, some people were a little skeptical and a little cautious about the dependence on courts to initiate and push policy on environment because even at that time the question they raised was, you know, what if one day the courts are not on your side? You know, What if they take a different approach? And I think we've actually seen that happen in the last like decade where suddenly in Bombay in the past 10 years, you've seen the Mumbai High Court sort of clear a bunch of projects that affect mangroves, that affect coastal marine life and things like and they've cleared a bunch of those projects in part because they don't you know, a number of times they've said, we can't stop development. You know, we can stop the infrastructure expansion. And they may put conditions on it. Whereas in the late, in the 1990s, there was stopping them. You know they were much more rigorous. So I think the limits of judicial activism are really clear, you know and we've run into them. And I think that When I've spoken to some activists who went to the court in the last, in the past decade, they've come away with the feeling that, you know, we have to engage with politicians. We have to engaged in politics and not just go to the Court because if once the Court says no, we can't do it, then you're, then, you're stuck, you know. Yeah, I think we've seen the limits of judicial activism in the, in, in past decade on environmental issues.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, I think another thing that comes up in your work and Tariq, I mean this comes up constantly in the conversation about Delhi, which is that the geography of the problem has really changed, right? So like if you think about a city like Bombay, the pollution no longer comes from a handful of well-identified sources which originate inside the municipal boundaries. Vaishnavi, we think some of your work points the fact that you know if there are estimates was just a very large share of the PM 2.5 originates outside of the city dark as you know in Delhi there's this constant struggle between what the Delhi government can actually do given the stubble burning that takes place in and so on and so forth, so. You know, I think another factor in this conversation is federalism, right, and the fact that this spans boundaries, but also spans governmental hierarchies. It's not just a state or center issue. You also have to bring in municipal governments and put tight and so on and so forth. So I guess, you know, this is just an open question to both of you, which is, you know, to what extent do you think that we've we're seeing progress or innovative ways of trying to stitch together solutions that also address the fact that this is a borderless issue that spans horizontally, but also, you know, works up and down the political food chain as it were.

Tariq Thachil I guess I'll let Vaishnavi answer from a kind of more embedded perspective on policy. What I would say is like looking at the political system, which is what I've been focusing on, I think my worry is exactly that this kind of issue lends itself to being politicized through blame games, both kind of this regional diffusion and kind of partisan differences. And so that combination can lend itself to. Even picking particular sources to blame and cherry pick. I mean, the truth is, at least in my understanding from most source attribution studies, pollution is coming from everywhere. It's coming locally and it's coming extra locally. It's not that it's only coming extra-locally or that it is only coming locally. And there are different levels of government that might be needed in different levels of coordination to deal with different problems. So I think some policy experts that we spoke to, like issues around municipal waste segregation and burning is an issue that municipal governments could deal with. And make some dent in. But there are other issues in which the local government is relatively less empowered. So, depending on the source and depending on the authority that is related to that source, you will need coordination across these levels. But the problem is that that same feature of having this compositional feature of being coming from many sources can lend itself to highlighting the source that is politically expedient. One place where we saw this, this is not research that we've done, but. Researchers from the Center for Policy Research had kind of highlighted that when they looked at parliamentary questions on this issue, they found that actually some 30% of parliamentary questions on this issues for the timeframe they analyzed it was on the issue of crop burning. And crop burning is one of those issues that can again lend itself to saying this is happening somewhere else. And one maybe heartening fact was when we asked Delhi voters, they actually gave kind of Punjab farmers or farmers outside of Delhi a very minimal role and kind of who they held the most responsible. So that's one kind of silver lining. But I think still a lot of the dynamics of how we're seeing this play out certainly in Delhi was a lot this kind of partisan blame gaming between different tiers of government, who's responsible. We could even start internationalizing the issue and say some of this is coming from outside of India's borders. And while all of those things may be empirically true, they may like kind of weaken. A kind of effective policy response. And I think the second thing that I'm a little bit worried about is that maybe the main feature that the way that this will be dealt with is kind of private solutions that only a few can afford. I mean, the dominant conversation among certainly the elite classes that we spoke to is kind of what is the most effective home air purifying system, which is fine, but that is not going to solve this problem, like no country has solved its air pollution crisis through. Private air filtration systems. And so I think my worries for the road ahead are on those two very different registers.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, I think just on the second worry, Tariq, I mean there's good reason to be worried, right? Because if you think about the solutions to the education crisis has been private schools. If you think the solution to the water crisis has water tankers. If you're thinking about the solution of the public order and police issue, it's private security guards, right? And so I think for people who have means, who are certain kind of middle or upper middle class, there obviously is a tendency to kind of look for those solutions if they believe that the state isn't going to be able to kind provide things that are going to be actually effective. And directly impact their lives, right?

Tariq Thachil Yes, and we can both completely understand and support individuals making those choices. Certainly, I would want my family and do want my family members to have air purification systems in random. But if that becomes something that takes the edge of our understanding of the public nature and public health nature of the problem, then I think that would be a worrying trend for an issue like this.

Milan Vaishnav So basically, maybe I'll just end with you on the kind of same question, right? Which is once pollution becomes an air shed issue as it has, you know, that spans municipalities, spans levels of government, you know how do you create accountability? And then, you have you seen anything from your own reportage that kind of suggests maybe some limited hope on this issue?

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Hope. I don't know about it. Hope is a hard thing to come by these days, I understand. Yeah, I mean, so I think, so there's something called the National Air Quality Clean Air program, cities program, I forget the exact thing, acronym, but that end cap, that's it. The five-year period for that is expired. The second version, 2.0, is under formulation. And I know for a fact that they are going to be looking at both PM2.5, which is the smaller, more dangerous particle, as well as the airship as an administrative or governance unit for the problem. In Mumbai, I can say that there is a committee that was set up by the High Court, which... Has members of the municipalities outside Mumbai, so the larger mega urban region, also in that committee. And one of the things that they are trying to do is to bring them together on one platform to talk about this issue. And also for each municipality, they're trying to make them create an air quality cell in the municipality, because this is also a question of capacity within government. And having, you know, a vertical that actually deals with it. Similarly, there is a Indo-Gangetic Plain Coordination Committee now, which I think was set up either by the Supreme Court or the government, I'm not sure, that is supposed to be looking into managing a regional air pollution across, you now, state boundaries. So, there's certainly a direction um, towards kind of coordinating across boundaries. I don't know how that's going to work yet. I'm waiting to see whether that can work and whether that, you know, it's whether that can work. I mean, it is also true that, you know if it can work administratively, that can also push things forward. I mean there is the political sphere and then there's the administrative sphere. There are the bureaucrats and the institutions that just carry on regardless of who's in power. Um, and, and suddenly I see that in Mumbai because in Mumbai, the municipal corporation is a very, um, uh, prominent and powerful, uh historical institution. It is the richest municipal corporation.

Milan Vaishnav And rich and has money.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Absolutely. And one of the problems they face, which is quite different from Delhi, I would say, is that a lot of projects in Mumbai are sanctioned by the state government, and they have no say over it. They're kind of overridden by the State Urban Development Department, but they get all the flak for all the outcomes, for all of the negative outcomes. Um, and so in that sense, um, there is a, you know, it, you know, blame can be is usually. A portion to the municipality. I think it's going to be tough to coordinate across boundaries. I don't know how else to say that. We're going to have to see what they do. One of the questions historically in Mumbai that's always been raised is whether we should have a mayor and because you see say a city like London or New York and you see how the mayor is and they're directly elected and so they kind of responsibility rests with them on civic issues. And one of the debates that constantly turns up in the history of Mumbai is that if you have a directly elected mayor, then you can be more accountable. And then if you had in the Mumbai region, multiple municipalities with directly elected mayors, they could come together. I don't know, I think this is an open question in this moment.

Milan Vaishnav My guests on the show this week are Tariq Thachil and Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar. Tariq is a CASI senior faculty fellow and a professor of political science at Penn. He was also the director of CASI from 2020 to 2025. Vaishnav is an award-winning science and environment journalist based in Mumbai and a former visiting fellow at CASI. I want to thank you both for helping us kickstart this great collaboration between these two institutions and organizations. I thought it was a really rich conversation, you know, spanning two very, very different perspectives. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar Thank you. That's great.

Tariq Thachil Thank you very much.